Sustainability claims are everywhere. From flooring and furniture to lighting and wallcoverings, manufacturers promote products with environmental labels, certifications, and green messaging. As awareness of the built environment’s impacts on human health and wellbeing grows, building managers and facilities teams face an abundance of sustainability claims, certifications, and product information to evaluate. The challenge is not finding sustainable products. It is understanding the certifications and transparency claims, as well as the product lifecycle, to ensure sustainable products maintain value over the life of the building.

While it may seem the answer is to select products with the longest list of certifications or the lowest embodied carbon, that approach can overlook factors key to building performance. For facility teams, durability, maintenance requirements, and long-term performance often deliver greater environmental value than products that excel in a single sustainability metric.

“Being overwhelmed is normal,” said Candon Murphy, HOK’s Material Resource Manager. “The sustainability certifications for materials and products can be specific to product categories; they can be expansive. Some of them cover a lot of things; some of them cover one thing.”

Identify the Building’s Goals

Before product evaluation, building owners and facility leaders should identify what sustainability means for their organization and facility. These conversations are crucial before renovations, retrofits, product replacements, or refurbishment projects.

Jill Dexter, Associate, Interior Designer at Stantec, explained that understanding sustainability priorities early helps teams make better product decisions because those priorities vary based on the building’s purpose, occupants, and operational goals.

Understand What Product Documents Tell You

Facility teams often encounter a source of confusion when evaluating products: understanding the difference between transparency documents and certifications.

Transparency documents, which encompass Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and Health Product Declarations (HPDs), offer information about a product. An EPD outlines the environmental impacts, such as embodied carbon. An HPD discloses a product’s ingredients and associated health information that affects humans.

"It's important to distinguish between transparency documents and certifications," Dexter said. "Certifications require manufacturers to meet established standards, providing practitioners with a consistent framework for evaluating product sustainability and performance against that standard."

For facility managers who may not evaluate products and materials daily, Murphy recommends understanding sustainability impact categories rather than memorizing hundreds of individual labels.

“You have to conceptually understand the impact categories to understand the certifications,” she said.

The AIA Materials Pledge and Mindful Materials are resources that organize certifications into broader categories and simplify each label to what it measures.

Mindful Materials outlines the Common Materials Framework, a clear and simplified explanation of the five impact categories: Human Health, Climate Health, Ecosystem Health, Social Health & Equity, and Circular Economy.

“If you can conceptually understand the impact categories, then you can start asking about the certifications,” Murphy said. “Then you can figure out what certifications are more effective than others and what certifications may not be 100% truthful or greenwashing.”

Marketing is not Meaningful Data

Facility professionals who review product documentation must recognize the difference between measurable performance data and marketing language to combat greenwashing. Murphy explained that a sustainability webpage with environmental messaging is not the same as independently verified performance data. Transparent documentation or reputable third-party certifications verify a manufacturer's statements about a product.

“Having a sustainability page on your website about how sustainable the company is does not equal a certification if they don’t give any data,” Murphy said. “I have no reason to believe anyone until they show me the numbers, and this is why we want to ensure we’re asking for these certifications.”

Dexter encourages facility professionals to understand the information within transparency documents, rather than relying on marketing language.

Stantec’s internal learning sessions help teams interpret EPDs and HPDs so they can find the information that aligns with their building’s sustainability priorities, rather than letting the documentation overwhelm them.

“There's the greenwashing aspect, too, with the buzzwords and churn words. Try to get all of that out of your head when you're looking for something, so you can stay specific to meet your goals,” Dexter explained. “That's where I think the education, in those little bite-sized, 30-minute sections [is important]—this is a cool material, this is innovation, this is what to look for in your EPD—and how to translate that material spec into material credits.”

Performance before Sustainability Labels

A product’s embodied carbon and material health are important considerations, but for facility teams responsible for long-term building performance, durability and maintainability must remain priorities.

“The first thing we think about when we're truly talking about a sustainable, resilient building is ensuring the material meets the performance of the building, not if it has the lowest embodied carbon, because that doesn't matter if you're ripping it out and replacing it in six months,” Murphy said. “Now you've created a much bigger sustainability problem. What I am making sure first and foremost is that the material is going to last, and it's going to look good for a long time.”

Dexter echoed that understanding a product’s embodied carbon, expected lifespan, maintenance requirements, and repairability helps facility teams determine whether a product will continue to deliver value after installation.

Build for Future Facilities Teams

A sustainable product decision does not stop once the building opens. Facilities teams need documentation outlining maintenance requirements, repair options, replacement timelines, and end-of-life steps so sustainability goals continue throughout the product’s lifecycle. Even when there is staff turnover, new members know what to do with products.

“If we help them by documenting it and telling them what they can do with a product, it really helps down the road,” Dexter said. “We have to be thinking and designing for that.”

The foundation for long-term building performance begins with sustainable product specification, but facility managers and building operators are responsible for carrying forward those decisions through ongoing maintenance, repair, and replacement. Access to credible documentation, maintenance requirements, and product lifecycle information helps protect building performance while enabling facility teams to operate efficiently and support sustainability goals throughout a product’s life.